In the manufacture of clothing it is often desirable to provide an ornamentation in the form of a design stitched in a metallic thread, such as gold thread. It has been common practice to form such thread by wrapping a strip of metallic foil or the like around a strand of ordinary thread. Fairly satisfactory patterns can be produced with such thread if the stitching is performed manually and done very carefully. Such ornamentation is, however, very expensive, since a considerable amount of hand labor is involved. Attempts to use this thread on sewing machines has been very unsatisfactory, because the threads will not slide smoothly through the eye of the needle. When one attempts to use such prior art thread in the eye of a needle of sewing machines, the eye tends to tear the metallic foil, so that the free ends protrude from the pattern. Even if the foil is not torn, it may be damaged to the extent that the pattern is less than desirable in appearance. The action of the eye of the needle on the foil is accentuated by the fact that the needle reciprocates over a given part of the thread several times during the stitching operation.
One way of overcoming the deficiencies of the prior art metallic thread has been to stitch the pattern in reverse. That is to say, the operator places the garment or the shoe material in the sewing machine with the inside surface uppermost. The metallic thread is then placed on the bobbin rather than on the needle and, therefore, the metallic thread becomes the under-thread in the pattern. Since the garment has the inside surface up, the metallic thread appears on the outside surface. This method has a number of drawbacks. For one thing, it is difficult to produce an appropriate, neat pattern when the stitching is done from the wrong side of the clothing with the pattern appearing on the right side of the pattern. Secondly, it is still necessary to operate the sewing machine at slow speed, because of the fragile nature of the thread. These and other difficulties experienced with the prior art materials have been obviated by the present invention in a novel manner.
It is, therefore, an outstanding object of the invention to provide an ornamental thread having great resistance to abrasion.
Another object of this invention is the provision of an ornamental thread capable of operation through the eye of a needed of a sewing machine that is operated at high speed.
A further object of the present invention is the provision of an ornamental thread for use in making stitched patterns in clothing or the like.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a metallic thread which is simple and rugged and is capable of use where machine operation and high speed are necessary.
A still further object of the invention is the provision of a method of making a metallic thread, which is strong and rugged and is capable of being used through the eye of the needle of a sewing machine.
With these and other objects in view, as will be apparent to those skilled in the art, the invention resides in the combination of parts set forth in the specification and covered by the claims appended hereto.